The present invention relates generally to microfluidic laboratory technology for chemical, physical, and/or biological analysis or synthesis of substances on a substrate with a microfluidic structure. It relates in particular to handling substrates with microfluidic structure.
Efforts in the field to miniaturize separation systems such as liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis systems are high because such miniaturized systems generally provide improved performance characteristics. This results in reduced production and analysis costs. Due to miniaturization the expenditure of coupling and handling the devices increases. Especially handling microfluidic chips with a complex fluidic channel system demands increasing efforts. Known in the art are glass chips fixedly glued on a plastic carrier as disclosed for example in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,495,104 B1. Another approach is to implement the miniaturized fluidic channel structure on flexible chips as disclosed in the U.S. Pat. No. 5,500,071. Used for separation such microfluidic chips normally comprise very sensitive parts, which can be easily destroyed if touched by mistake. In addition, the flexibility of the material complicates handling and positioning before coupling these microfluidic chips with a laboratory apparatus, for example a mass spectrometer. DE 100 122457 A1 discloses a container for an analytical chip. U.S. Pat. No. 6,663,837 discloses a housing box for electronic chip with biological probes. A microfluidic device is known from U.S. Pat. No. 6,048,498.